It’s a Climate Emergency…Unless the Mayor and the Head of the City’s Sustainability Office Want to Fly With Their Political Friends, Half a Dozen City Staff and “Plus Ones” to Germany

In November 2019 AnnArbor City Council voted to pass a Climate Emergency resolution. When the resolution passed, Mayor Chris Taylor told the public, “This is an opportunity for the city to begin to address a topic of planetary concern in our own small way.” Now, the Mayor, two outgoing Council members and Half a Dozen City Staff are planning a Junket to Germany. The trip includes Council members Elizabeth Nelson, Chip Smith, Zachary Ackerman and Christopher Taylor. City staff include Sustainability Office head Dr. Missy Stults and Planning Department head Brett Lenart, among others, including the option to bring “plus ones.”

Council member Jeff Hayner (D-Ward 1), who sits on the Energy Commission, decided to refuse the trip over concerns about the environmental impacts and the fact that outgoing Council members were being given a “send off” on a “junket” to Germany. None of the Council members included in the Germany trip sit on the Environmental or the Energy Commissions. Taxpayers are being asked to send the Council Liaisons to the Michigan Theatre Board (Taylor/Smith), the Council member who sits on the Zoning Board of Appeals (Nelson) and the Council member who sits on the Housing and Human Services Advisory Board (Ackerman) on a junket to Europe.

Staff members will have their expenses covered by money from their respective conference and professional development funds (General Fund dollars). Council members are expected to use their $500 in annual expense funding (General Fund dollars), plus pay $1,000 for their tickets. The host city in Germany will cover lodging.

Sixteen-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg sailed from Europe to the U.S. rather than take a transatlantic flight. Thunberg doesn’t use air travel, because every passenger on a transatlantic flight is responsible for creating two tons of carbon dioxide emissions per roundtrip flight.

Three months before sponsoring his Climate Emergency resolution in November 2019, Taylor, his wife and a several other people from Ann Arbor jetted off to Japan on a trip to Ann Arbor’s sister city Hikone. Taylor’s trip to Japan generated 5.2 tons of carbon dioxide per roundtrip traveller, or a little over 30 tons total. The trip to Germany will generate 2 tons of carbon dioxide per roundtrip traveller.

Together, the two trips alone will spew over 60 tons of carbon dioxide into the air. According to the EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Equivalencies Calculator (https://www.epa.gov/energy/greenhouse-gas-equivalencies-calculator) Taylor’s two trips equal the greenhouse gas emissions from 11.6 passenger vehicles driven for an entire year. The carbon dioxide footprint from the two trips equals the consumption of 6,125 gallons of gasoline, the burning of 59,976 pounds of coal and the total electricity use of 9.2 homes.

The Germany trip includes Dr. Missy Stults who was hired to head the city’s Sustainability Office. She is Ann Arbor’s Sustainability and Innovations Manager. In answer to recent questions asking for metrics that show how the Sustainability Office has reduced the city’s own environmental footprint, City Administrator Howard Lazarus responded that Stults’s office has not been “fully funded.”

On January 22, 2020 Concentrate published “How is Washtenaw County Responding to the Climate Crisis?” In that piece, Dr. Stults was quoted as saying, “You can set an ambitious goal and figure out how you’re going to achieve it. That’s the approach we’re taking.”

Stults did not respond to written questions sent to her and city officials recently asking about the environmental impact of the Germany trip. The Sustainability Office’s webpage shows no metrics concerning the Sustainability Office’s impact on the city’s consumption of fossil fuels, recycling, potable water consumption and rain water harvesting. Stults’s department is funded with $800,000 from the city’s portion of a county Mental Health Millage.

The Germany trip also includes two outgoing City Council members, Chip Smith (D-Ward 5) and Zack Ackerman (D-Ward 3). Ackerman and Smith will be only months away from the ends of their respective terms when the Germany trip is complete. Both voted in support of the November 2019 Climate Emergency resolution. In his comments in support of the resolution, Ackerman told the public, climate change is “an existential and moral crisis.” Chip Smith said, “I encourage community members to now hold council accountable to take real action and make hard decisions on matters including land use and transportation.”

In her comments in support of Taylor’s Climate Emergency resolution, Dr. Stults told the public, “Globally, the impacts [of climate change] are even more dire with projections showing significant rises in the world’s oceans, the melting of permafrost and ice caps, salt water intrusion into water supplies, life-threatening temperatures across much of the world, an increase in the extent and number of wildfires and other extreme weather events….”

While at the same time elected officials and city staff plan for themselves and their “plus ones” a junket to Europe that will pump tens of tons of CO2 into the air, Ann Arbor residents were recently surveyed and asked to entertain the idea of a new Sustainability Millage.